Ronnie Biggs waits for decision on early release

Ronnie Biggs will find out on Thursday whether he is to be released early from his 30-year sentence for his part in the Great Train Robbery.

Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber, has been admitted to hospital after complaining of chest painsPhoto: REUTERS

By Gordon Rayner, Chief Reporter

10:26PM BST 22 Apr 2009

A parole board hearing in London will decide if Biggs, 79, should be freed after serving just a third of his jail term, which would make him eligible for release in July.

Despite his poor health, including a series of strokes which have left him unable to speak or walk, successive Home Secretaries have refused appeals to release him on compassionate grounds following his voluntary return to the UK from Brazil in 2001.

Instead, his legal team has been told that he will only be considered for parole in accordance with the law at the time he was convicted in 1964, which stated that prisoners on fixed-term sentences could be released one third of the way into their jail term.

Biggs, who is currently being held in Norwich Prison, will not attend the hearing, but his lawyers are confident he will be released because the primary consideration of the parole board is whether he still poses a risk to the public.

Biggs served two years of his sentence for the 1963 mail train robbery, which netted £2.6 million, before he escaped from Wandsworth prison in 1965, spending the next 36 years on the run in France, Australia and finally in Rio de Janeiro.

He was arrested when he arrived back in Britain eight years ago, when he said his most fervent wish was to "walk into a Margate pub as an Englishman and buy a pint of bitter".

One of the most outspoken opponents of his early release was Det Chief Superintendent Jack Slipper, the man who tracked town the gang, who maintained until his death in 2005 that Biggs did not deserve compassion because he and the gang had shown no mercy to the train's driver, Jack Mills, who was beaten with an iron bar and never fully recovered from his ordeal before he died in 1970.